5 months ago

5 months ago

5 months ago

The Lede. A Leader Who Happens To Coach Basketball. If you can’t stand Duke and/or Coach K you might want to stay off the Internet for a while because you are going to be hearing about them a lot over the next few months. While the Blue Devils picked up their 19th straight win and 27th in 28 games, this game will be remembered (particularly by those in The Bluegrass State) as the game where Coach K surpassed Adolph Rupp on the all-time Division I wins list. In Duke’s first game without Kyrie Irving, who could be out indefinitely with a toe injury, the Blue Devils relied on their superior athleticism, depth, and execution to crush a respectable Bradley team, 83-48. The Braves’ four losses this season coming in were by a combined 22 points, but they weren’t that fortunate tonight as the Blue Devils blew them out by 35 points. Playing in place of Irving, Andre Dawkins was more than adequate as he scored 28 points including 8 of 14 from beyond the arc. Duke may not be the same dynamic team without Irving, but they are still really, really good. As for Coach K, now that he has passed Rupp for third he only has two more coaches ahead of him (Dean Smith at 879 and Bobby Knight at 902). We don’t think we need to tell you about the type of hysteria that you will see when he approaches those two living legends in the coming weeks and months.

Coach K has his sights set on The General

Your Watercooler Moment. Playing with a women’s ball in Illinois. Coach K might have dominated the mainstream college basketball media’s attention tonight, but the Twitter-verse was dominated by the strange situation in Illinois where the Fighting Illini and Oakland Golden Grizzlies played the first seven minutes of their game with a women’s basketball before Mike Tisdale noticed that something felt wrong and pointed it out to the official who switched the ball. Having dealt with that the Fighting Illini rallied from down nine early to defeat a tough Golden Grizzlies team by a score of 74-63. Although we would like to be able to attribute the Golden Grizzlies early success to playing with a women’s ball (they outscored Illinois 15-6 while playing with the women’s ball and were outscored 68-48 with the men’s basketball) that would be selling their effort short as they led the #16 team in the country until there were 15 minutes left in the game. Demetri McCamey scored nine points in 62 seconds to give Bruce Weber’s squad a quick seven-point lead, which they never relinquished after that point.

Tonight’s Quick Hits...

Steve Fisher’s Quips. His team is now 9-0 after defeating California tonight, but the longtime coach of the San Diego State Aztecs thinks that his home folks might be going a little overboard with their support and faith of the team. As he put it, “they think we can play the Celtics… and if Kevin Garnett didn’t play, they think we’d have a chance.” In this clip, he also talks about how big of a deal it is for his squad to defeat a Pac-10 opponent on their own floor, as it hasn’t happened for a very long time (the answer: SDSU last did it in 1982 vs. Oregon in Eugene, well before Fisher could even spell Fab Five).

Glens Falls, New York. Seemingly an entire town came out to watch its prodigal son, Jimmer Fredette, return to play basketball. The star guard scored 26 points in variety of ways to thrill the beyond-capacity home crowd at the Glens Falls Civic Center tonight. Take a read through Tae Andrews’ RTC Live at the arena tonight — people were sitting or standing in every available space in this building. We love to see support like that — more teams should do this sort of thing for the local HS heroes that move on.

Game #65. RTC Live heads to an old familiar in the form of Louisville’s Freedom Hall, but the Cardinals of Rick Pitino won’t actually be there.

Our next stop is at Freedom Hall on Wednesday night as Notre Dame (8-0) makes the trip to the Bluegrass for one heck of a road test against Kentucky (5-2). True, Freedom Hall isn’t Kentucky’s home court (nor is it Louisville’s, now), so one could say that that techincally makes this a neutral site game. Don’t kid yourself. They’ve actually turned the Freedom Hall floor blue and painted Kentucky’s logo at center court, and Louisville is loaded with UK supporters, too, so there’s nothing neutral about this. The Irish are playing excellent basketball and a win here would be a superb resume-builder come March, but Kentucky’s still stinging from the loss at North Carolina and could use a win against a ranked team to boost its confidence after dropping two of their last three and taking a hit in the polls; could a loss here send the team with the nation’s best recruiting class out of the Top 25? And they say early December basketball doesn’t mean anything. We disagree. The live blog window opens at 9:15 pm ET for this SEC/Big East Invitational contest. Read the rest of this entry »

Shamelessly cribbing from the clever NBA catch phrase, we here at RTC will present you with the 2010-11 edition of Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball as we ramp up to the start of the season a little over a month from now. We’ll be bringing you players to watch for this season and moments to remember from last season, courtesy of the series of dump trucks, wires and effluvia known as YouTube. If you want to have some fun while killing time, we encourage you to re-visit the entire archive of this feature from the 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons. Enjoy.